MS CLAKE IS DOING A PHD WITH LUKE KENNARD AT BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY, ON THE FEMINIST ABSURD IN AMERICAN AND BRITISH POETRY JENNA CLAKE I...

Monday, 20 October 2014

Guest Review: Willington on Spurrier

Alice Willington reviews

The Pilgrim’s Trail

by Frances
Spurrier

The Pilgrim’s Trail is a short
collection of 49 poems. Like the pamphlet form, it has benefitted from
distillation; each poem here has sufficient weight and the collection is good
enough for a reader to take the time to read and re-read it. Many of the poems
examine the past, such as 'Commercial Road'and 'What finished the Romans in
Britain', and in these it is as if the narrator is a visitor in a museum or
a hall of statues; however what differentiates the poems is the degree to which
the poetic persona begins to interact with the past being examined. A statue
does actually come to life in 'The Return
of Mrs Odysseus', when such interaction begins, 'as you beckon she unfolds
herself – steps forward.' However, some of the ground occupied by Spurrier is
not so much a dialogue with the past as a fight to the death to save life from
the ghosts which would claim it.

In 'Sea Level', which was the poem I returned
to again and again as I read the collection, the past is 'the suck and clutch
of sand', and it is guarded by the screams of 'every damned tern and kittiwake',
but the narrator, even as she nets her 'haul of memories', is trying
desperately to stay alive:

The churchyard is full of
names, there are many ways to join them:

fishing Is one, drinking another, mourning a
third.

I fish, I drink, I mourn, yet I am trying not
to add my name to that eternity.

The image of
screaming birds recurs in the poem 'Scene
by the River'. Time has passed, from a mythic beginning in a garden 'with
damson and apple', to a city of vodka, rags and rage. The image which also
recurs is the image of powerful, uncontrollable water. The Thames in the poem
is:

……swollen with rain,

flowing so fast even the swans
are turning circles,

paddling without purpose in the
reckless current.

Water breaks
into the home with violence; in 'The
importance of boats and rainbows in exceptional circumstances'…. a “deluge”
of rain pours into houses “with hilarity”; in 'Cuthbert loses his cool' ravens have torn the thatch off his roof
and he can’t keep dry. Yet, in the title poem 'The Pilgrim’s Trail', the sea and the land are woven together as
Aidan crosses the sand so that “all may pass”. The poem is expressing hope, but
Aidan is moving swiftly because he can “hear the sea following him” and the
tide is covering his trails. The fear of the sea, and the failure to come to
accommodation with it is expressed again in a re-telling of the Selkie myth in 'Selkie'. For Spurrier, is the sea the
world of the dead, the world of the past? In 'Elegy for Diabag', in which the poet tries to “solve the mystery/of
belonging” and a ghost from the time of the clans appears, the road to the sea
ends at Diabag, a hamlet which “grieves its loss of souls”

The hinterland
of the past, and the world of the dead, is ground similar to the poems of Jamie
McKendrick, but what characterises McKendrick is his laconic and humourous
narrator. Wit sometimes surfaces in The
Pilgrim’s Trail, as in 'What Tom said
to the witch', and 'Cuthbert loses his
cool', and when it does there is an increase in clarity of imagery and
cohesion of slant rhyme. I wanted a lot more of this. In addition, one habit
Spurrier should lose is that of using an explanatory single line to close ('Radiocarbon Dating' and 'Thought-weeds'), as it has the effect of
dampening down the excellent sense of mystery achieved in these poems.

Alice Willington reviews regularly for Eyewear, and is a British poet.